1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tape printing device for printing characters on a tape print medium, and, more particularly, to a tape printing device with a function to allocate a plurality of print lines across the width of the tape medium, so that the print lines are neatly arranged on the tape print medium.
2. Description of Related Art
The applicants of the present invention have developed a tape printing device for printing characters and marks on the tape print medium (e.g. a tape medium with a width of 10 mm, 24 mm) as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,066,152. The tape printing device has a convenient application in printing tape labels to be secured on the back of file notes.
In addition to the above disclosure, in Japanese Laid-Open patent publication No. HEI 1-152070, the applicants have disclosed a tape printing device with a function to print full scale characters in a 24 dot by 24 dot format and quadruple scale characters in a 48 dot by 48 dot format, a center printing mode to arrange the quadruple scale characters in the center of the tape medium and a bottom alignment mode to align the bottoms of quadruple scale characters on the tape medium.
Conventional tape printing devices perform dual line printing by aligning bottoms of the characters and marks to the base alignment set on the bottom of the print allowance area and by aligning tops of characters or marks to the top alignment set on the top of the print allowance area.
In the above construction, the width of the blank space between the two lines changes according to the sizes of the characters, bringing an unbalanced space between the middle blank space and a top blank space and the middle blank space and a bottom blank space, thus degrading the visual impression of the printed tape medium.